In April 2020, I began going through ten years worth of notebooks and loose ends, notes on scraps that were spread across multiple shoe boxes. I thought I’d assemble the usable notions into one notebook to clean the clutter. After 3 months, I'd distilled various strands of scenes, characters, and dialogue into this notebook, filtering them into a variety of some 80 categories that I made up as I went along. From there I parsed out 24 characters (inspired by Joan Tewkesbury’s process for writing Nashville), I drew a 24x18 grid, and began freewriting scenes on notecards. This process went on for 6 months--to distill the often abstract ideas or feelings of the notes into something closer to an image, something workable. Then I took the wall-length grid (butcher paper) and began attributing scenes and dialogue to characters, roughly sequencing them. Eventually there was more material than could fit reasonably into one film.
Inspired by a mis-remembering of a character map that Roberto Bolano drew in a notebook for 2666, I clustered constellations of characters together in a way that made sense and broke the timeline into 3 separate but overlapping films. Each film occurs on the same timeline/time structure, but shows different worlds and perspectives. I adopted a linear ‘domino falling’ or ‘pass-the-baton’ structure for each — similar to that of Richard Linklater's film Slacker but with some diversions — characters do recur across the tryptch of films but their individual development is somewhat minor to the collective development of the film. I wanted a film with no single protagonist, no apparent external villain — all containing the possibility for both. The films meander through various communities both real and imagined, capturing portraits in motion, and illustrating a range of ideas and questions through vignettes which flow one into another. Various drafts of each film were completed and shared in the fall of 2021.
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What are the films “about”?
In many ways what they are about is the way our lives are intertwined — how the energy we bring to a room or a conversation ripples beyond that limited time and place and keeps rippling. We’ll follow this invisible energy as it passes from one person or place to another in this minisociety. In seconds it can drift smoothly between lives, following the transfer of a particular energy—a glance, an exchange, a vibration, a touch, or a leap of mental association—that movement of energy is our secret protagonist and we follow its poetic logic through revelations to a new equilibrium.
There are themes that thread throughout each film as well as specific characters: a painter, a translator, a junk collector, a flower seller, a man living in a tent, an english teacher, a chemist, a ceramicist, a surrealist, a publisher, a fisherman, a hypnotist, a tour guide, a high school student, a seamstress.
The three feature films (90 mins) are not chronological as in a trilogy where the first is followed by the second and so on. Rather, this collection of feature films is a triptych where each film presents exactly the same time period as the others, only from another perspective with different groupings of characters foregrounded. Each film inhabits very different worlds and yet they are all linked together in a myriad of ways. The scripts are structured linearly so that each scene follows directly the one that came before and leads directly into the one that comes after like a relay race or dominos.
The films can be viewed in one of two ways: (1) one at a time, in any order, or (2) all at the same time in a three-channel exhibition. In scenario 2, this trio of simultaneousª films can be presented side by side, running concurrently, so that a viewer wearing headphones could switch at any moment to another audio track and turn their seat to shift perspectives, seeing the same world and cinematic moment from an entirely different point of view.
Read more about the project here: https://abecedarian.net/
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ª “In the unconscious all archetypes are contaminated with one another. it is as if several photographs were printed one over the other; they cannot be disentangled. This has probably to do with the relative timelessness and spacelessness of the unconscious. It is like a package of representations which are simultaneously present. Only when the conscious mind looks at it, is one motif selected, for you put your searchlight onto it and it just depends on where you direct your searchlight first, for in some way you always get the whole of the collective unconscious.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz in Interpretation of Fairy Tales
